East End Review

Tag: Ellie Broughton

The Hard Stop, an interview with filmmaker George Amponsah: Language of the unheard

Protesters in Tottenham voicing their anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan.

Five years after the death of Mark Duggan and the subsequent riots, many Londoners from black and minority ethnic communities still struggle to trust the police. The 2013 inquest into Duggan’s death at the hands of police found the shooting to be a ‘lawful killing’, despite many witnesses testifying Duggan had not been armed. A gun was found at the scene, but it bore none of Duggan’s prints, blood or DNA. An expert witness went as far as to testify it was “very difficult” to imagine the deceased throwing the gun to the spot where it was found, some 20 feet away, after he had been shot twice. Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, two childhood friends of Duggan, were determined to find justice for him and the resulting documentary, The Hard Stop, explodes historical tensions between law enforcement and London’s black community. The film’s director George Amponsah reveals what East London said about the film, what divides Londoners, and how to protest.

How have Londoners responded to the film?

We screened it at the East End Film Festival in June and afterwards had a panel with two police officers. Emotions were high: feelings of sadness, feelings of anger and a sense of injustice. There were a lot of questions asking those officers how they felt the police might change some of the patterns of behaviour reflected in the film – the main pattern being a history of not being accountable when things go wrong.

Is there a clear dividing line between people open to Duggan’s story and the people who are not?

I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not trying to be evasive in saying this but I’m a filmmaker. What I know is films and trying to tell a story. Part of the motivation for making The Hard Stop was that I wanted to make a film that was about an important subject and about my home. I was born in London. I’m British. In many senses I’d be satisfied with the film as long as it is something that provokes debate and discussion. Because what’s important to me in some ways is that Martin Luther King quote that appears at the beginning of The Hard Stop: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s just important for a debate and discussion to be had rather than for a significant amount of people to think their voice and opinion is not being heard, and is being discounted – so much so that they find themselves taking to the streets and getting involved in the kind of disturbance that we saw in Britain in 2011.

What advice would you give to young Londoners who want to carry on the conversation started with this film?

Try and get involved in things that are constructive and creative. Try to find a way of protesting where you’re getting your voice heard, where it can’t be discounted, and certainly in a way where you know you’re not going to be imprisoned or find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

thehardstopfilm.com

August 25, 2016
Stoke Newington Literary Festival – preview

Comedian Sara Pascoe

Now in its seventh year, the Stoke Newington Literary Festival returns this weekend with a big focus on local writers and publishers, music and food.

Some of the highlights from this year’s programme include Hackney writer Dawn Foster, who will be discussing her book Lean Out at 3pm on Saturday 4 June in the Unitarian Chapel.

The book looks at the rise of what it sees as a corporate ‘one per cent’ feminism that exempts business from any responsibility for changing the position of women in society.

Local independent publishers Influx Press are to stage author readings from An Unreliable Guide to London, comprising 23 stories about the lesser known parts of the city.

On Saturday evening, one of the festival’s music highlights sees ex-Ruff Sqwad grime MCs Roachee and Prince Owusu talk to writer Kieran Yates at 6pm in Ryan’s Bar.

Then at 11am on the Sunday, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance – the artistic and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity in 1920s New York – is the subject of a memorial event for Eric Walrond, one of only two writers buried in Abney Park cemetery.

Fifty years after Walrond’s death, his biographer James Davis flies over from the US to talk to Diane Abbott MP, Colin Grant and Hackney writer Robin Travis about the writer’s profile in the UK and his work with Marcus Garvey.

On Sunday afternoon, Observer journalist Jude Rogers talks to punk musicians Gina Birch, Pauline Murray, Shanne Bradley and Helen Reddington about the impact of punk on women at 1pm in Abney Hall.

Shortly afterwards, the co-founder of the Quietus music website John Doran will join author Simon Mason in The Prince pub to talk about his experience of why the music business and drugs seem inextricably linked – one of the big topics of his 2015 memoir Jolly Lad from Hackney publisher Strange Attractor.

Alongside local writers and publishers, the festival also features a few big names: comedians Sara Pascoe and Robin Ince will be lighting up Stoke Newington Town Hall on the Saturday night, and novelists Jonathan Coe and David Mitchell will close the festival on Sunday from 4pm.

There are also a tonne of food events in St Paul’s Church. Weekend ticket holders can nab limited spots on a walking tour of Hackney bakeries, as food writer Xanthe Clay introduces gozleme and baklava experts at Hackney’s Turkish and Kurdish bakeries from 12.30pm on Saturday.

Perhaps the most curious event on the bill is a food panel featuring Stoke Newington resident Ed Balls. The former shadow chancellor will be appearing at St Paul’s on the Sunday, where anecdotes about sandwich faux-pas on the campaign trail will presumably give audience members much to chew on.

Stoke Newington Literary Festival
3– 5 June
stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com

June 2, 2016
Will Volley, Hackney graphic novelist and creator of The Opportunity – interview

A panel from The Opportunity, Will Volley’s graphic novel.

Multi-level marketing, sometimes known as pyramid selling, may not strike most people as a gripping subject for a debut comic noir. But then Will Volley is not most people. After publishing graphic novel versions of Romeo and Juliet and An Inspector Calls, the 35 year-old took a year off work, moved back home and wrote his own comic.

The Opportunity is about Colin, a successful door-to-door salesman on the verge of getting his own sales office. One day everything changes and Colin’s sales team is given a new all-or-nothing target, and only five days to achieve it in.

Volley explains why door-to-door sales made such a good subject, the Stoke Newington schoolteacher who inspired him and the fallen footballer he’s covering in his next novel.

How much of this story was drawn from your own experience?

My experience in a multi-level marketing company was limited to about two or three weeks. I enjoyed it – being a navel-gazing art student and coming into that climate was great because it was different, and the people there were enthusiastic. But there were things about this company that didn’t make sense: all the staff lived together in the same flat and it felt a bit like a cult. Through research I found support groups online for people who’d worked in this company, and then I devised a plot from interviewing ex-managers.

Did you ever worry about how you were going to make a gripping thriller about multi-level marketing?

No! When I was working there I thought: this is the perfect premise for a story. But it took me a while to come up with a plot I was satisfied with.

How’s the political landscape and the job market changed since you worked for this company?

It’s the same. A funny thing happened when I had literally just finished the book. I got a knock on the door, got up from my desk and went downstairs, and there was this young salesman. His pitch was word for word the same one I used ten years ago. Talk about weird.

So I sort of cut him short and said, look, you need to be careful. He looked startled. I felt bad about it because he looked disappointed. Young people want to be optimistic and they offer incredible loyalty. That’s what this company provides: it gives you a thick blanket of security and the managers big you up. It’s hard to say how common these types of companies are now, but at the book launch someone came up to me and said they had spent a day with these guys in Tottenham.

You mentioned in another interview that one of your teachers brought Daredevil comics into school.

That was a real turning point. I went to William Patten Primary School and I had a teacher who was an ex-punk. He introduced me to weird things you wouldn’t expect kids to read and seeing that artwork by that specific artist changed everything for me. I fell in love with it and my own drawing just kind of grew from there.

What are you working on next?

A story about an ex-footballer who turns to a life of crime. I read a statistic that 40 per cent of ex-footballers go bankrupt within five years of their career ending. Football’s all they know and if they’re trying to maintain their lifestyle lots of them end up gambling, getting into debt and some even go to prison. It’s going to be much more personal: another falling from grace story, but this time a redemption tale.

The Opportunity is published by Myriad Press. ISBN: 9781908434791.
RRP: £12.99. Volley will be signing copies at the East London Comic Arts Festival (ELCAF) on 11 June.

May 18, 2016
In a Land of Paper Gods author on ‘naughty children who disappeared from history’

Rebecca Mackenzie, author of In a Land of Paper Gods

Rebecca Mackenzie grew up in the jungles of Thailand, where her parents worked as Christian missionaries, but at 12 she and her family moved back to a Scottish fishing village.

Now living in Hackney, MacKenzie has written her debut novel, In a Land of Paper Gods, which steers away from her early experiences to tell the story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school in China at the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War.

Rebecca, how long have you lived in Hackney?

I moved to London at 17 when I went to university and I’ve been here ever since. I moved to Dalston over ten years ago. Friends used to be hugely relieved when I’d meet them from the bus stop and walk them back again. Now I live at the top of a vicarage in Stoke Newington. I love it, even though the first thing I see outside my front door is a graveyard.

The thing that seems to have struck a lot of reviewers is that it’s quite personal book – something that had parallels with what you experienced growing up.

What drew me to the lives of missionary kids was my personal experience. I grew up in what was partly an evangelical environment, but I was also surrounded by Thai animism, spirit worship, and the idea that there were spirits and creatures everywhere. But I chose to set the book in a different part of Asia, at a different period in history because I needed that distance to kickstart my imagination.

While there are definitely biographical themes there’s also a truth that comes from my dreamworld that’s not like the truth of your day-to-day reality.

I believe in synchronicity as well and there were synchronous moments in the writing for the book. For example I went to interview an English woman who’d lived in China during the Sino-Japanese war, and like me she was the daughter of missionaries. We were having this nice cup of tea together and I felt something. I couldn’t stop looking at her. It turned out that she’d returned from China to Edinburgh and she’d moved into the same street in Edinburgh I’d lived on, 50 years before me, and her grandparents came from the same tiny village in the north of Scotland my grandparents came from.

I thought that the voice of the lead character, Etta, was very strong. How did you create her?

I saw these formal school photographs at SOAS from a missionary school. Some children, if they weren’t sitting still, became a kind of blur. I became interested in these naughty children, who somehow disappeared from history as a result of fidgeting.

What things as a writer do you find particularly helpful about living in London?

Being near other writers and other creative people is a wonderful resource, but with that comes distraction.

How do you make time for writing, solitude and focus?

I love sitting in Rare Books and Music in the British Library. The concentration in there spurs me on to keep working.

In a Land of Paper Gods
is published by Tinder Press.
RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9781472224194

April 21, 2016
Campaigners battle to save Norton Folgate from demolition

Projected image of Norton Folgate. Image: Spitalfields Trust

Nearly forty years after Sir John Betjemin’s campaign to protect the historic site of Norton Folgate near Spitalfields, campaigners face another battle against developers British Land.

The developers plan to demolish 75 per cent of buildings on the site, including Blossom Street’s 1886 Victorian warehouses and the former residence of playwright Christopher Marlowe.

It also plans to increase the commercial use of the site, which lies entirely within the Elder Street Conservation Area, by 65 per cent.

Tim Whittaker, an administrator for the Spitalfields Trust and a Whitechapel resident, said: “The conservation area appraisal for Elder Street is the only piece of legislation that Tower Hamlets Council have concerning the area. It is therefore of particular importance and weight and should be adhered to.

“British Land’s proposals clearly flout this in a number of ways but perhaps most importantly in their proposed wholesale redevelopment of the Blossom Street warehouses.

“The appraisal addresses this in detail, saying that any adaptation of these warehouses for reuse must be kept to an absolute minimum.

“Therefore it is important that Londoners remind Tower Hamlets Council of their own legislation and their duty to abide by it and treat conservation areas with due care.”

Tower Hamlets Council has confirmed it will accept emails and letters about the application until April, in advance of hearing British Land’s application. A council spokesperson also confirmed there was no date set for the Strategic Development Committee to hear British Land’s application.

A spokesperson for British Land told the East End Review: “The scheme preserves the 19th century townscape and refurbishes the warehouses to secure their long term future. The proposal is precisely an example of creative re-use of these unlisted buildings.”

British Land tried to develop the same patch of land last year, and added that their new 2015 scheme keeps more of the Blossom Street warehouses than the previous one did.

David Milne, the curator of Dennis Severs’ House museum on Folgate Street, said: “The plans to redevelop the site would not only be a great loss to the historic nature of these beautiful streets but would in fact remove all trace of the human character that brings people in their thousands to this vibrant and diverse community.

“We do not spend our days wandering around vast office complexes, we visit and cherish the small buildings and houses that continue to evolve as they do so wonderfully not only here within the streets of Spitalfields but all across our city.”

April 9, 2015
Hackney style stars in ‘people’s history’ of British fashion

Style icon: Hoana Poland. Photograph: Nina Manandhar

Local author Nina Manandhar has featured East London heavily in a new book on British popular style, What We Wore.

The book is a collection of photos submitted by people from all over the UK, covering street style from 1950
to 2010.

Published by Prestel, the book includes portraits of Four Aces founder Newton Dunbar, Dalston entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid and founder of Strut boutique Hoana Poland.

Manandhar has previously featured portraits of shoppers on Ridley Road as part of her London photography book, Money On My Oyster. She herself has lived in Hackney for over seven years.

What We Wore includes a series featuring Winston Milton, born and bred in Hackney, who is a friend of the author.

She said: “Hackney has changed so much in the time since these photos were taken. There is a thriving community of creatives here, but it’s really important to me as an artist that the new communities mix with the ones that have been here for years and Winston is a really good example of someone who bridges that divide.”

Manandhar pointed out that the book also traces the lineage of club culture, which has been integral to Hackney’s history – featuring for example Natalie Coleman’s outfit for Labyrinth, established on the site of the old Four Aces club.

The author explained: “It’s great to see how different social spaces have been inhabited by different groups in Hackney’s history.

“Stories about style are an entry point to wider social history for me and the readers.”

What We Wore: A People’s History of British Style is published by Prestel Publishing. RRP: £22.50. ISBN:9783791348988

December 22, 2014